Federico Mayor
The issues and
proposals outlined in this editorial are developed by Federico Mayor in his recently
published book Un Monde Nouveau.1
Federico Mayor has served as Director-General of Unesco for twelve years. His second
mandate at the head of the Organization comes to an end in November 1999. The nomination
of his successor is a key item on the agenda of UNESCO’s
forthcoming General Conference
(October 26-November 17). Each member state has a vote within this sovereign body
of UNESCO.
1. Un Monde nouveau by Federico Mayor, in collaboration with Jérôme Bindé of UNESCO’s Analysis and Forecasting Office (Editions Odile Jacob, Paris). The English version,
“The World Ahead: our Future in the Making” is forthcoming.
“We can’t predict the
future, but we can prepare it,” chemistry Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine once observed.
For the most part, the future will be what we make of it, even if by definition and
through circumstance its fabric consists of uncertainty, change and unpredictable
creation.
Two major upheavals have profoundly changed our vision of the world. First, the scientific
revolution has taken us from an age of certainty and dogmatism and plunged us in
an ocean of uncertainty and doubt. We believed in the predictability of phenomena
governed by the imperious certainties of science: now the paradigms of determinism
are yielding to a concept of nature and history whose hallmark is uncertainty. Secondly,
the third industrial revolution, based on the information age and the rapid introduction
of new technology into all facets of human life, is changing the world into a global
one.
Paradoxically, this globalization, far from creating a homogeneous global society,
whether desired or deplored, is subjecting societies to a logic of disintegration.
It is a logic of selective pairings, of exclusive groupings, of separation, rifts
and disaffiliation. The highly asymmetric economic success of a system which is based
on the concept of liberty but has forgotten equality and solidarity is a virtual
political failure: it is coupled with an ethical vacuum and with a complete lack
of purpose. The power of globalization is devoid of meaning.
In the face of these fractures and this vacuum, four challenges must be faced. The
first is that of peace, which is the precondition for successfully tackling all the
others. Since the end of the Cold War, a fourth category of countries has appeared
on the international stage, in addition to the industrialized and developing countries
and those in transition. It comprises countries at war or emerging from conflict
in which the state has often foundered in genocide and intercommunal massacres.
The second challenge: will the coming century witness the onset of a new kind of
poverty whose victims will live side by side with unprecedented wealth? According
to the United Nations Development Programme, in 1960 the 20 per cent of the world’s
people who live in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20
per cent—by 1995 they had 82 times as much income.
Sustainable development and the wise management of the global environment pose the
third great challenge. Everywhere humanity is draining the resources which could
have fed tomorrow’s generation. We have to find our way towards another type of development,
one that is more economic, more intelligent, more caring. Because humanity has acquired
the technical capacity to commit collective suicide, it has to learn to assume the
“mastery of mastery”, in the words of French philosopher Michel Serres.
The fourth challenge is that of the “erratic boat” syndrome. As a result of globalization,
many states appear to have mislaid their maps, compasses and direction-finding instruments,
even the will to set a course. They are tossed about by the waves, as though history
had fallen into the hands of “anonymous masters” who can no longer be controlled—financial
markets, raw materials markets, statistics of all kinds.
But awareness of these problems has sharpened and solutions exist: hope remains.
If only we can find a way to give millions and millions of silent people a real opportunity
to use their freedom of thought and of speech, we would see the decisions of the
mighty bow to the only power that counts: that of the people.
Globalization must never remain confined to only the networks, telecommunications,
computers, the media world or markets. It will have to be based on the consolidation
of a public democratic space worldwide. It is only on this condition that we will
succeed in rendering globalization humane, making it a project with truly universal
promise, and giving it a meaning.
This is the course we must plot for the twenty-first century.
